Scott Harmsen / Kalamazoo GazetteA combine with a corn head drops ears of corn in a tractor-hauled trailer in northern St. Joseph County early Wednesday afternoon. This cornfield is located on the north side of Flowerfield Road, just west of US-131 south of Schoolcraft.

SCHOOLCRAFT — Dry weather and great growing conditions early in the season have Michigan farmers across the state harvesting corn, soybeans, sugar beets and just about every other field crop — all at once and, in some cases, weeks ahead of schedule.

Jody Pollok-Newsom, executive director of the Michigan Corn Growers Association in Dewitt, said the hope now is for dry weather to continue, to allow harvest to move swiftly and to eliminate the need to further dry corn before it is stored.

“This week and next they’ll be gearing up to go full tilt,” she said. “It has been a busy year that has come on fast.” Normally farmers are able to stagger the harvest of their crops as they mature over several weeks. Not so this year when hot, dry weather after pollinating seemed to move crops along to maturity quickly.

Pollok-Newsom said it will be late November or early December before growers will know how much the fields yielded. But the U.S. Department of Agriculture report, released Friday, projecting a record harvest nationwide gives farmers plenty of last-minute tweaking to do as they finalize their sale and storage plans, she said.

“We are a peninsula,” she reminded. “We have a lot of corn coming off and it’s going to need a place to go.”

John Anderson, an economist with the American Farm Bureau Federation, said the USDA’s national forecast of 13.2 billion bushels is below the August projection but still a record crop.

Contact Rosemary Parker at rparker@kalamazoogazette.com or 269-388-2734. The Associated Press contributed to this report.